Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to hear that Congress members will skip Netanyahu's speech no matter what reason they offer. Here are some of them:

It's too close to Netanyahu's election. (That
doesn't persuade me. If we had fair, open, publicly funded,
un-gerrymandered, verifiably counted elections, then "politics" wouldn't
be a dirty word and we would want politicians to show themselves doing
things to try to please us before, during, and after elections. I want
them acting that way now, even with our broken system. I don't want the
U.S. interfering in Israeli elections, but allowing a speech is hardly
the same as backing coups in Ukraine and Venezuela or giving Israel
billions of dollars worth of weapons every year.)

The Speaker didn't ask the President.
(This is likely the big reason that Democrats are promising to skip the
speech. I'm actually amazed more of them haven't made that promise.
Netanyahu seemed to me to miss the extent to which the United States has
become a term-limited monarchy. Congress typically wants to pass the
buck on wars to the President. The President typically controls one of
the two parties quite tightly. But do I actually care that Congress
didn't consult the President? Hell no! Imagine if, during the run-up to
the 2003 attack on Iraq, Congress had offered a joint-session microphone
to El Baradei or Sarkozy or Putin or, indeed, Hussein to denounce all
the bogus claims about WMDs in Iraq? Would you have been outraged by the
impoliteness toward President Bush or delighted that a million people
might not get killed for no damn reason?)

These kinds of reasons
do have a practical weakness: they lead to calls for postponing the
speech, rather than canceling it. Some other reasons have more serious
flaws.

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The speech damages bipartisan U.S. support for Israel. (Really?
A slim minority of the President's party skips the speech for a laundry
list of lame excuses and suddenly the United States is going to stop
providing all the free weapons and vetoing every attempt at legal
accountability for the crimes of the Israeli government? And that would
be a bad thing if it actually happened?)

The speech hurts the critical effort of negotiations to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. (This
is the worst of the bad reasons. It pushes the false idea that Iran is
trying to build a nuclear weapon and threatening to use it. It plays
right into Netanyahu's fantasies of poor helpless nuclear Israel the
victim of Iranian aggression. In reality, Iran has not attacked another
nation in modern history. If only Israel or the United States could say
as much!)

As I said, I'm glad anyone's skipping the speech
for any reason. But I find it deeply disturbing that an enormously
important and deeply moral reason to skip the speech is obvious and
known to every member of Congress, and while most are acting against it,
those acting in accordance with it refuse to articulate it. The reason
is this: Netanyahu is coming to spread war propaganda. He told Congress
lies about Iraq in 2002 and pushed for a U.S. war. He has been lying,
according to leaks this week of his own spies' information and according
to the understanding of the U.S. "intelligence" services, about Iran.
It is illegal to spread war propaganda under the International
Convention on Civil and Political Rights, to which Israel is a party.
Congress is struggling to keep up with the wars President Obama is
continuing, launching, and risking. Here's one war Obama seems not to
want, and Congress is bringing in a foreign leader with a record of war
lies to give them their marching orders. Meanwhile, an agency of that
same foreign government, AIPAC, is holding its big lobby meeting in
Washington.

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Now, it is true that nuclear energy facilities create
dangerous targets. Those drones flying around French nuclear plants
scare the hell out of me. And it is true that nuclear energy places its
possessor a short step away from nuclear weaponry. Which is why the U.S.
should stop spreading nuclear energy to countries that have no need of
it, and why the U.S. should never have given nuclear bomb plans to Iran
or sentenced Jeffrey Sterling to prison for allegedly revealing that
act. But you can't accomplish good by using horrific mass murder to
avoid horrific mass murder -- and that's what Israeli-U.S. aggression
toward Iran means. Stirring up a new cold war with Russia in Syria and
Ukraine is dangerous enough without throwing Iran into the mix. But even
a war that confined itself to Iran would be horrifying.

Imagine
if we had one Congress member who would say, "I'm skipping the speech
because I'm opposed to killing Iranians." I know we have lots of
constituents who like to think that their progressive Congress member
secretly thinks that. But I'll believe it when I hear it said.

David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)